Outreach International

Special Guests: Laura Sullivan

Laura grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, a suburban girl with big city dreams. She studied television production at Charles Sturt University, and has been working in television since 2002.

Laura was that kid fascinated by junk on the ground, and would always come home with some strange object that she’d found. She liked to draw and make things. To create. Her hands were always dirty. It was in Sydney in 2005 that she found her first note, and she's been finding notes in cities around the world ever since.

Laura also grew up in a sect called Outreach International. Whilst there, her pastor disapproroved of her note-finding habit. But since leaving the sect, she embraced her passion and turned that habit into Found By Laura – an art project that has seen her launch a book in February 2017 and exhibit her notes in a number of Sydney galleries. She'll soon take the exhibition to other cities across the country and around the world.

EPISODE DETAILS

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Part 1

In May 2017, a sect that started in Melbourne, Australia, 50 years ago, and has been highly secretive over the last few decades, decided to change its closed-doors policy and go public with a website. Whilst up until now very little has been known about the group except by direct conversations with former believers, its members go to government schools, attend public universities, and work in everyday jobs. They could be your neighbour, your colleague, or even a friend, and you’d have no idea what’s really going on in their private lives.

CORRECTION: There is a mention of the Book of David in this episode – this was a slip of the tongue, it should be the Book of John.

Part 2

Laura left Outreach International when she was 32 years old, having been born into the sect in the late 1970s. Hear her story as she relates the experience of being a young woman in a highly patriarchal and controlling organisation, the difficult decision to leave, the trauma of starting her life from scratch, and the joy that she's found in this new life – a kind that most of us take for granted. You'll also hear from other ex-members about their experiences, and where the sect stands today.